The Pacific Room Read online

  It’s her mat of atonement. In some villages, when a crime has been committed the chief will kneel outside the house of the family wronged and ask for their forgiveness. Teuila thinks of Henry’s family now – not just its isolated members, each wrapped in their own shame, but as a collective thing, a living organism growing into the community, an aiga. Despite the way she has been mistreated, Teuila kneels on Henry’s mat and prays for them, because their loss is also hers.

  The mat contains her. It’s as if her world has shrunk to these last few woven strands. She could be on a raft or an island – or so she imagines as she lies waiting for her hydrographer.

  She’s thinking this when the rain finally comes, first pitting the leaves of the moso‘oi bush outside, then lashing its branches against the window in wave on wave of drenching sound. The smell is of the ocean, and the sound carries with it an ocean’s distance. How easy it is to imagine the island returning to the sea.

  Waiting for Henry, she counts the raindrops one by one.

  His face swims towards her, slightly out of focus. The eyes are squinted and shiny, the smile broad and wide like a cat’s, with the beginnings of a moustache – cat’s whiskers, she likes to think. His shirt is imprinted with flowers, and around his neck is a string of tiny wooden beads ending in a swag of red threads: si‘usi‘u pusi.

  Most beautiful, though only hinted at in the photograph, is his torso. It’s not overly muscled like those of the rugby players who return thick-necked from Auckland. It’s smooth and boyishly taut, with nipples and belly button forming a perfect triangular constellation.

  Watching him dance at Tropicana, with grass tassels around his calves and a flag slung across his hips, she saw his torso licked by flame, the air thick with kerosene smoke. Later, when he came to her at three o’clock in the morning, she liked to take those beads in her mouth, tasting his sweat.

  That was four years ago, what now seems a lifetime. But good things happen from slowness, she thinks. Like Henry. Henry will come to me tonight, she thinks, out of the rain.

  All she has now is his photograph. It was taken on his last trip back home, a few years before. As a junior surveyor on HMNZS Resolution he had been stationed in Apia Harbour – four days in, ten days out. His knowledge of the Pacific had been reduced to The Admiralty Manual of Hydrographic Surveying. She remembers thinking, How can an ocean be contained by a book? And struggled to comprehend the vast tedium of his task.

  Using an old-fashioned echo sounder, the ship had travelled up and down Upolu’s coastline. Trawling the sea in grids of parallel lines, they had measured the ocean depth at low and high tide, with all that seemed unfathomable reduced to blinking data on a computer screen. ‘It’s like mowing the grass,’ he’d joked.

  With all those squiggly lines, the surveying charts seemed as exotic as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Just a few miles out the ocean plunged suddenly from thirty to three thousand metres. She wondered what this fecund seabed looked like, this womb of the islands.

  ‘I want you to take me there,’ she’d whispered in his ear.

  And so he did. One of his last stints onshore coincided with the November full moon, and at four o’clock one morning he woke her, not even giving her time to gather her wits or her spilling hair before leading her to the lagoon, blindfolded by sleep.

  Around them the palm trees were shot silver in the moonlight; the lagoon was shiny oil-black.

  ‘Watch carefully,’ he instructed her, and after a few minutes the water began to ripple and pulse with the faintest green phosphorescence. Into it they dived, and it was as though their lovemaking had spawned not so much a child as an ocean, the water thick and warm with the texture of albumen. Their hands could barely contain the rising streams of green, the softest and most slippery of tendrils, which Henry managed to scoop up with his baseball cap.

  For breakfast they had eaten their catch, this milt of the coral worm – fried with onion on toast, palolo. It was their little secret. He had just licked his lips when she took the photograph.

  Now his face swims towards her, looming in and out of focus with the waves of the rain.

  Chapter 17

  VA

  She’s still seated on the mat when the tremors pass deep underground. She knows from experience that they will last only a minute or two, that the ocean’s seismic plates are shuffling, pulling the world briefly apart before finding new points of alignment (that much she had gleaned from Henry’s Admiralty Manual of Hydrographic Surveying). But for a moment she imagines she is surfing, held in perfect sway, before being thrown suddenly forward onto her knees, so now she is crawling.

  Strands of hair drop to the mat, looping and threading and darkening her vision, crisscrossing her in shadow and bringing her back to some more essential view of herself.

  When the tremors finally subside and she regains her balance, she feels something has shifted. Not the physical world, still miraculously intact and defined by the familiar spareness of her father’s room. But something within her has somehow been prised open, to reveal a tiny crack of light, a new chance to remember.

  It’s the rhythm of the rain, its gentle persistence, that coaxes her memory of the wedding.

  Looped with long blue streamers, the cathedral’s facade appeared something like a wedding cake; its white interiors were fringed with palm leaves and draped in siapo cloth. It’s now approaching dawn of the following day, but Teuila wishes she could untie the streamers and fold the cloths into neat little squares. She wishes she could take things back to the beginning – to the virginal whiteness of Shema’s beach dress from Chan Mow & Co. But she can’t.

  She snatches at her memories through the sound of the rain. Individual moments draw clear, but it’s as if the rest is free-floating in infinite space – the space her father called va, the between-ness that holds all the elements of the world together. Sosimo joins her here, a presence as fluid as the inky spools of his hair, along with the stories of her childhood. It’s as infinite as the horizon, this va, surfaceless like the December rain.

  She remembers the old story her father had told her as a child, about Vaea’s bride, Apaula, and how beholding their slain son Tuisavalalo, her husband had slowly turned into the mountain and her tears had formed not one river but five. Five rivers. Vailima.

  Grief is something instructive to build from, she thinks. It’s a kind of strength, not weakness, and transforms everything in its wake. She thinks of a mountain of tears, a mountain of sadness. Only from this point can you hope to see things clearly.

  It’s in this way, as if glimpsed from a distance, that her memory of the wedding returns to her. She remembers Henry walking down the aisle; a little girl in a pink-sashed dress crying; a bird with a red underbelly darting from view; the windsurfer travelling fast towards her.

  But she realises that her sleepless night has altered her memory of the day – deliberately reversing the order of events, undoing them, one by one, untying the blue streamers that can’t be undone.

  She hopes it will never stop raining. It’s so forgiving and final, this curtain of water beyond the louvres of her bedroom. It demarcates time, she thinks, between then and now. But if you listen, really listen, it also unravels it. It helps take her back, to where she was doubled up in the pew by the door at Henry’s wedding.

  She saw the scene upside down: her view of the harbour and the windsurfer jump-cutting through the waves towards her. For a second the boy’s face was so close she could see his features clearly. It was not the embassy kid Klaus had spoken about, but herself as a child. The view was fleeting, scudding past, and as she returned to the service before her, she realised the priest was in final preparations for the union of Henry and Shema.

  She knew what she must do. Up went her eyes: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. She counted the ceiling fans around the large chandelier above the centre aisle, noting their differing rhythms and speeds. It was here that she saw the little bird dart, disappearing
with its red underbelly into the cloud of crystal droplets. And through the upper windows – those portholes in this blue and white vessel suspended over the horizon – there was Mount Vaea, instructing her. It summoned her to rise.

  A sea of heart-shaped fans fluttered. Teuila knew she must stand up, but before she could she saw the little girl with the pink-sashed dress, who had escaped her mother’s hold and was running towards the bride and groom, crying. It was a bad sign, the worst of omens. But before Teuila could stand up and say her piece, Henry had stepped down from the altar, passing the girl in the pink-sashed dress, to move swiftly down the aisle.

  He looked straight ahead in the stunned silence that quickly enveloped the church. Around him hatted heads dropped in shame. Fans stopped mid-flutter. Only Henry moved through the now breezeless room.

  He couldn’t see the flower she was wearing since it was pointing away from him, out the door and towards the harbour – the direction he was now taking, following the windsurfer, fast out of their lives, and Teuila knew that Shema had worn the white beach dress from Chan Mow & Co for nothing.

  Chapter 18

  PACIFIC TIME

  It passes through the night, so low on the Richter scale that no one will remark on it the next day, but sending a deep tremor through his body, a silent shudder. It lasts just a few woozy moments.

  In its aftermath Lewis wonders if he’s dreamt it, so surreal was the feeling of the hotel’s cement walls turned suddenly liquid, the room held inside a wave, suspended by it. The air was viscous, a bubble about to burst. Without his glasses, he saw the ceiling fan turn in the motion of a double helix, before resuming its slow-motion wobble, the keeper of Pacific time. His bedside lamp had remained on, a miraculous thought.

  Two decades before, something like an earthquake had riven Lewis and his world in Dunedin. He had gripped the scaly trunk of an elm, the summer sky splintering into a million tiny leaves, but Lewis had felt frozen and murderous, his teeth chattering as if his mouth were full of snow.

  ‘It’s about regaining your balance,’ his doctor had told him in the devastating week that followed his psychotic episode. ‘Being bipolar is a terrible gift, the gift of shapeshifting. Living with it is also learning to mourn its loss.’

  Sensing a musical nature in the young Lewis, with his wild blue-black hair, the doctor had added: ‘You’ll need to conduct your own requiem for all those surrendered souls.’

  Of course it was much more than that, Lewis learnt, and ‘finding balance’ would take a small lifetime of tiny incremental adjustments, a marathon of patience. But every now and then his footing faltered, and he would find himself slipping willingly through the chasm – it was the sensation of slipping he couldn’t live without, even though he knew giving into it would be the end of his world.

  As he puts on his glasses, the scene draws clear. Strewn like seaweed by his bed are the stems and petals from a flower arrangement; an orchid has imploded. Offered on his pillow are tiny smears, a seismographic smudging, and reaching for his nose he can feel a little blood, its metallic taste creeping up to the roof of his mouth. Spurts of adrenaline bring him bolt upright in his bed.

  Now he remembers what occurred only moments before. Falling from his bed. Falling headfirst towards the sharp edge of the coffee table which sprang towards him, the pages of the book outstretched like arms with the portrait of Tusitala embracing him. It was welcoming, like finding land while bodysurfing. Then he was back in his bed, but this time the portrait was falling towards him, the book’s pages unfurled and flying through the air.

  He remembers how the portrait was the only still thing in the room, around which everything moved and shifted. He thought that the room would never stop turning and dissolving, unanchored from the island, but still he was okay; swaddled somehow, straitjacketed by Tusitala’s smile that only he could see.

  It’s still night-time outside and Lewis falls into a deep and wondrous sleep.

  Chapter 19

  LADYFINGERS

  They are still green and embryonic in form, the little ladyfingers she retrieves from the ground before reaching her mother’s house. It is not beyond ripening, this tiny bunch, a prayerful hand dropped from the heavens overnight, dislodged by the earthquake and the rain. Something for the table, she thinks.

  As usual the television is turned down low. Her mother is watching the winning try from last night’s test match in Auckland. Repeated in slow motion, the player dives and skids, again and again, hugging the ground, making love to it. There’s something in his closed-eye reverie that makes Teuila remember him, from somewhere in their past. A friend of one of her brothers – another soul who has flown the coop.

  She’s thinking of his birthmark in the little cleft of muscle near his hip – he called it his iliac crest, and she remembers tracing its secret bloom with her finger – when she puts the bananas down on the table and lights a cigarette.

  Today her mother doesn’t stand up, nor does she smile. The bananas look suddenly clenched and prickly in the gloomy light cast by the rain, as does her mother’s face – drained not of colour, but of faith – like she sometimes appears, though only rarely, after a bad day at bingo.

  How little time it takes for their roles to reverse, Teuila thinks, towering over this childlike figure now silent and unsmiling at the kitchen table. Has she grown, or has her mother got smaller? Faith fills her mother, ripening her spirit, opening her hands in prayer and plumping her soul. Without it, she disappears into the folds of her Mother Hubbard dress, clenched and unformed.

  Glancing at the wall of pictures inside, Teuila soon discovers the source of her mother’s loss of faith. The faces of Christ still wink into infinity; the schoolboy limbs of her brothers scramble towards the horizon. But at its centre is an aching absence, marked by the single rusty nail.

  It hovers, an unbleached rectangle of wall, this unwanted patch of green.

  On the floor below, where the incense had bloomed the day before, the portrait has shattered – or rather, its glass face – into a myriad of unhappy fragments. But from where she and her mother are now standing, it is Tusitala’s own face that appears to have broken into its many parts. An eye has collapsed, the line of his nose broken, his lips prised apart.

  Teulia is reminded of her dream from the day before, and wonders what this can possibly mean, Tusitala’s mouth opened in disbelief, then smashed by the angry earthquake overnight. But then she realises she is not here to understand the nature of loss or catastrophe, or even to offer condolences, but to be useful to her mother. That is her role.

  Here the refrain returns to her, from the women who flock to her at the travel agency down the road: ‘Show me, Teuila,’ they say. ‘Teuila the adorner. Show me how I can love again.’

  She is magnificent with her hands, coaxing and caressing, but most of all practical. Only what you can touch can you bring into being. In this way it takes but an old pair of pink rubber gloves, a sheet of waxed paper and a memento from her nights with Klaus at the embassy – an empty tin canister that once housed a bottle of Chivas Regal.

  Crouching down low she begins removing the shards of glass, piece by piece, each releasing the smell of old rotting wood and helping to restore the picture within. Her pink fingers move swiftly and gently, respectful that something more mercurial than a portrait is being handled and brought to light. Spilling from the frame is an essence, she thinks, something to catch with her fingers. It’s slippery and colourless and difficult to grasp, but it’s all she has of Sosimo – something spilling, a glint in the Scottish writer’s eye.

  And no sooner has her mother stopped crying than the sketch has been eased from its mounts, rolled in waxed paper, and entombed in a tube of darkness smelling faintly of whisky.

  Something winks at her all the while, this time not Jesus. Embossed in silver on the tin is a figure she now traces with her glove. A figure dressed in kilt and sporran, with blobs of tree or mountain hovering over his shoulders like angel’s wings, a si
lver saint.

  Teuila thinks of him as her saviour as she spirits him away.

  Chapter 20

  IN TIME OF RAIN

  Lewis wakes to rain. At first he can’t see it from the vantage point of his bed. The maid has drawn the curtains – not for his privacy, he assumes, but to shield their eyes from his spread-eagled nakedness. His limbs seem to jut out at all angles like his books piled up rudely on the coffee table.

  But he can sense it. To his ears, the individual droplets form a symphony; that it is unvarying comes as a relief at the same time as he feels consigned to a watery underworld. It’s something that connects him to everyone on Upolu, this rain, drawing them into the one consciousness.

  He’s imagining this as he urinates in the bathroom, his penis still distended from sleep, and looks out through the louvres and flyscreen to the back garden, the leaves labouring under the weight of the droplets.

  The rain drowns out the sound of everything, including the call of the maids. So as he goes back into the bedroom to open the curtains, he is surprised to discover a retinue of them standing there in their long dresses in matching canary yellow, with their mops and buckets.

  ‘Talofa, good morning!’ they call in unison, before slowly dispersing into the rain.

  Stepping into his tartan boxer shorts, he tries to makes sense of all that greeny-greyness out there. He can discern the darker shapes of palm fronds moving back and forth through sheets of water, and the shadows of shrubs which fan out to reveal a strange liquid void at the garden’s heart. Once his eyes adjust, he realises it’s the hotel swimming pool, an eye swelling with tears. At the corner is an artificial island with a solitary palm tree. Its loose leaves lash like a madwoman pulling out her hair.